RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are all sorts of awards coming up…Tonys, Oscars, and myriad awards for journalists- APME, SPJ, Data Journalism and so on.

In Greek mythology Apate was the spirit of deceit, guile and deception. Her counterpart was Dolos the god of trickery, craftiness and treachery.

So how about the Apate and Dolos awards?

Both the Apate and the Dolos should be awarded to The New York Times for all the disinformation they saw fit to print in 2013. The Dolos should be awarded by Thomas Friedman and the Apate, a little statue of Helen Thomas should be awarded by Christiane Amanpour.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/the-strange-moral-calculus-of-john-kerry/print/

On Wednesday the Israeli daily Maariv reported (summarized in English here) that the Israeli defense establishment

totally reject[s] the American proposal for security arrangements in the Jordan Valley…. The American proposal presented to Israel was based on a limited Israeli presence at the border crossings along the Jordan River for a limited number of years, together with the massive use of technological means such as satellites and drones that would replace the army’s presence on the ground.

The position of the security services, as agreed upon recently by the Defense Minister, is that no replacement for the IDF will protect Israel’s security interests, and that even the most advanced technological means do not offer a serious alternative.

Thursday found Secretary of State John Kerry in Israel for the tenth time since taking office last February. His mission was described as “pushing for the sides to agree on guidelines for what the final deal would look like.”

Meanwhile it was reported again that the Palestinian side—including Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and all his negotiators and officials—totally rejects any compromise, even a diluted, temporary Israeli military presence, in the Jordan Valley, calling it “Palestinian” even though it has never been under Palestinian rule and has been an Israeli territory since 1967.

Considering that other “core issues” like Jerusalem, “refugees,” and the borders of a putative Palestinian state are no less difficult, it is, as usual, perplexing to see Kerry continuing to invest American resources and prestige in pursuit of “guidelines” for a “final deal.”

But the show has to go on, and on Tuesday a third batch of twenty-six convicted Palestinian terrorist murders were freed; the release of four such groups was, after all, Abbas’s condition for entering the talks at all.

As Elliott Abrams noted in a perceptive blog post:

the prisoner releases are not CBMs [confidence-building measures]; they are CDMs, confidence-destroying measures. With some American pressure, Prime Minister Netanyahu has released a third tranche of long-serving security prisoners—murderers, to be exact.

The first thing this does is diminish confidence in the United States. After all, we never do this; we never release murderers or terrorists from our prisons for political reasons. That we expect Israel to do so teaches Israelis that we will ask Israel to take risks we would not take, and do not fully understand the security situation they face.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-magical-thinking-of-the-left/print/

The Supreme Court of Iceland has ordered a halt to road construction because of the environmental impact on the elves. Most of the modern world no longer believes in elves, fairies or gnomes; but environmentalists still do.

Members of the environmentalist terrorist group Earth Liberation Front refer to themselves as “elves” and to their acts of sabotage and vandalism as “elving” or “pixieing.” Environmentalist eco-pagans divided themselves into “fairies” and “trolls” with the fairies sticking to non-violence while the trolls were more apt to get physical.

The Dragon Environmental Network, which in its own words “links environmental action with magical practice,” is one of the more successful environmental neo-pagan activist groups. DEN boasts of using “eco-magic” to stop progress and “channel positive energy.” The basic principles of their environmental activism include “honoring the fair folk”; better known as the fairies.

Trolls, fairies, goblins and elves are easy enough to laugh off and those who believe in them can be dismissed as irrational; but the fairy hunters fool more people when they slip out of their tunics and pointed ears and slip on their white lab coats and parkas.

The “Australasian Antarctic Expedition” set off to another cold place not in search of elves, but in search of melting ice. Unlike the original expedition it knew exactly what it wanted to find. One of the purposes of the expedition was to “determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region of Antarctica.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4545/jews_as_rats_and_crows_scandal_on_palestinian_tv_involves_funding_from_eu_and_world_bank
THE PREZ OF THE WORLD BANK IS JIM YON KIM , PhD,MD AND FORMER PREZ OF DARTMOUTH….RSK

Palestinian Media Watch, a leading NGO monitoring the Palestinian media, has just come out with some shocking revelations of extreme anti-Semitic language on Palestinian TV. Funding from the EU, the World bank and others is involved (see below).

“The PA TV broadcast spoke about “crows” while showing visuals of religious Jews, and stated that “the rats are armed” while showing visuals of Israeli soldiers,” PMW said.

Jews as “rats” was a central theme of Nazi propaganda, and facilitated the Holocaust by dehumanising the Jewish people.

The press release said it was an episode of the programme Sights of Jerusalem broadcast in October. (It often takes time for such information to filter through since NGOs working in the West Bank and Gaza as well as Western journalists, habitually refuse to report information casting a bad light on the Palestinians, even if it is factually correct).

PMW quoted from the broadcast thus:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/when-the-press-is-a-poodle?f=puball This nation’s founders had a special role in mind for the media in the constitutional arrangements they carefully constructed.  It was to provide a fourth source of checks and balances on the potential abuse of power by the three branches of government, by virtue of journalists’ independence and, if assured freedom of the press, […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-ungrateful-congress-screws-its-own-military

The budget just passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama is shameful because it reduces the cost of living allowance (COLA) by 1% for military retirees under age 62.

In an effort for full discloser, I am a retired U.S. Army Reserve Chief Warrant Officer Five and Afghanistan War veteran. This COLA reduction will not affect me because I’ll be 62 by the time the reduction kicks in.

Younger retirees will soon lose tens of thousands of dollars they were promised when they volunteered to join the military. Elected politicians scoff at that because they claim these younger retirees will join the civilian workforce and have additional income in their retirement years. Have they considered how this will affect the over 50,000 retired servicemen and women who suffer from PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury, or are physically handicapped from the lost of one or more limbs on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan? These wounded warriors, who may never become gainfully employed again, were not exempted from the reduction in the COLA.

I fault both Democrats and Republican members of Congress who in their haste to go home for the Christmas holidays, decided it was more important to get out of town then actually consider the ramifications of their budget vote.

After the fact, Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA), who voted for the budget, has introduced H.R. 3804, which would completely repeal the reduction in COLA for military retirees. She wants it both ways like most politicians do. Rep. Rodney Davis, (R-IL) and Michael Fitzpatrick (R-PA), both of whom voted for the budget, have introduced similar bills as well.

Will States’ Rights Go to Pot?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367432/will-states-rights-go-pot-jonah-goldberg

On January 1, the Centennial State (it hasn’t yet changed its nickname to “The Rocky Mountain High State”) became the first place in the country to legalize marijuana sales for recreational purposes.

And Brandon Harris is stoked.

The 24-year-old Harris drove 20 hours from Cincinnati, along with a smoking buddy, to be the first Ohioans to buy legal pot in Colorado.

“It’s such a big day in history,” Harris, told the Washington Times. “The fact that we don’t have to be criminals and can just smoke, and not be looked down on, or have to mess with the local police.”

Well, he’s mostly right. Americans are still free — for now, at least — to look down on people for whatever reason we want. Simply because an activity is legal doesn’t mean I am barred from judging you negatively for engaging in it.

Decorating your room from floor to ceiling with Justin Bieber posters is perfectly legal — so long as you keep the paper a safe distance from the votive candles on your Bieber shrine. But if I walked into my doctor’s office and saw such a display, I would search for a new doctor pretty quickly. The same goes if I found out he was a big pot smoker.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367460/great-equalizers-rich-lowry New York City mayor Bill de Blasio gave a kind of St. Crispin’s Day speech for progressives at his New Year’s Day inauguration ceremony. He evoked a city ravaged by a crisis of inequality. What Rudy Giuliani was to out-of-control crime, de Blasio wants to be to rampant inequality — its scourge and vanquisher. […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/wrong-again_773261.html

To hear it from the New York Times editorial page, the many issues surrounding the attacks in Benghazi are now settled.

In a December 30 editorial, published under the headline “The Facts About Benghazi,” the newspaper proclaims an end to the 15 months of debate about the fatal attacks on the U.S. consulate on September 11, 2012. Citing an “exhaustive investigation by The Times” that it says “goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack” and “debunks Republican allegations,” America’s Newspaper of Record declares that “in a rational world” the investigation “would settle the dispute over Benghazi.”

Well then.

It’s hardly surprising that the New York Times would find the New York Times the final word on an issue.

But for the rest of us, rational and irrational alike, this revisionist account is neither authoritative nor definitive. The central thesis of the piece is wrong, and the sweeping claim the author has made in defending it is demonstrably false.

Here’s the background.

In a long, front-page article published in late December, David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times, offered an account of the attacks in Benghazi based largely on interviews with Libyans there, including some who participated in the attacks. From these interviews and others, Kirkpatrick declared that there is “no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorists had any role in the assault.”

http://carolineglick.com/the-new-york-times-destroys-obama/

The New York Times just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle East policy. Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional. Indeed, is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.

Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle East.

Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.